Ned’s Weeknotes (23rd Oct ‘26)
I’m Ned, MD at the Centre for the Children’s Workforce. These (hopefully more or less weekly) weeknotes are intended as a way of sharing our work and learning as we build the project. Please get in touch if you’re interested in this work — I’m on linkedin here and always up for hearing from people.
In a nutshell
Re-emerging from a painful month following the postponement of the Foundation Degree, a round of university conversations, the publication of our mapping work, and our contribution to the CST conference.
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4 things
- Reemergence: this week has been about finally emerging from a fairly excruciating month, following the news that we wouldn’t be able to offer the Foundation Degree this academic year. We’d poured so much energy into getting to the place where launching this year was possible, so it’s been a huge disappointment for us. We also brought a lot of people with us on that journey, so it’s been painful for them and that’s where a lot of our focus has been. I think we’ve managed a difficult situation with as much integrity and care as possible and I’m grateful to the CCW team for their skill, care, and flexibility in doing that - it’s an absolutely stellar group of people. I’m also grateful for Reach’s wider support and flexibility, as well as the understanding of the many people we’ve been talking to (both partners and prospective participants), but it has been pretty bleak so it’s nice to start moving beyond it.
- University Outreach: As a result of the above, we’re now entering into another round of conversations with potential university partners, with the ambition of running the programme from Sept 2027. We’re undoubtedly in a better position than we were this time last year — full curriculum, great team, partners, a better understanding of HE, a year closer to OfS registration, and we’ve proven that the demand in there too. If you’re a dynamic HE leader please get in touch!
- Mapping Work: I haven’t written a week notes since we published the mapping work we’ve been doing with ImpactEd over the last few months, but that’s now out in the world now and I think we’ve been really pleased with the results. Most of that is due to the quality of the tool, for which we thank Holly at ImpactEd in particular, and the brilliance of our colleague Katy who has really grabbed it as a project and has done a beautiful job. We’ve had coverage in CYPNow and TES, and we’ve started publishing the first of the sector responses we’ve got lined up. My intro to the project is here: https://childrensworkforce.org.uk/journal/this-map-is-not-the-territory
- CST Conference: I went to the CST conference last week in Birmingham, which feels like Glasto for trust leaders. Hilary Cottam was there and that was great, I was less convinced by there was lots of Reach stuff going on and a nice crew there. I was surprised how many people I knew having co-facilitated some of the Leading Trusts programme last year with Shelley — it felt like a connected scene/sector. Beck and I did a session on fragmentation and the children’s workforce, and used 3 Horizons as a sensemaking framework for that conversation. It worked pretty well and I’m reminded of how intuitive 3H is to introduce in a short space of time. The output is on my LinkedIn here.
Reading/Watching/Listening
I went to the Bugged Out 25th anniversary party at Drumsheds a couple of weeks ago, I read Magpie Murders by Antony Horowitz having started several novels I gave up on at the end of the Kindle sample, played a mobile game called Thronefall, the Children’s Commissioner report obviously went around our team and was interesting. Radical Help is the CCW book club at the moment.
